This not but not never.

11 Apr, 2025

The description of a poem, and though it might dull the essential sparkle of it, may also serve to clarify and crystallise, and to enlighten and enlarge, the thus allowed expanse exploded from the succinct and condensed centre that is the poetic bringing with it some greater meanings and associations of meanings in the reading.

The architect's Utopia, maybe some unbuilt poetry in pencil, is only ever in description, its essence being that it is not, it being merely the most and best that one could imagine and the sketch of it.

If some Utopia should become, so cease to be and shed its essence, though it should corrode on contact with reality, as all realised things do, it may still retain some residual essence of what it was supposed, hoped or imagined to be, what it could and should have been and so now is.

Should the essential nature of our proposed Utopia actually be in the very corrosion that reality brings, and therein is at its best and most, might that not be easy indeed, an easy Utopia and a beautiful one, born of the messy and vital culture that's the accumulated genius of all life, and it always at its best diverse, and equal, and inclusive.

There is no worthwhile Utopia but that which we can create, and so we must or will it mock us with its best just out of reach.

Apparently though the architectural Utopia’s been dead for a while now, some number of decades depending on who you ask, as presumably along with it is any such idealism as would inform an imaginable Utopia.

Anecdotal antagonists, strawboys stitched together for my purpose here, would tell with the mouths I'd give them of foolish indulgences these Utopias of the naive and ingenuous, of the deluded in their dreaming and dangerous in their delusions.

So it's good that it's dead then no doubt.

What though is Utopia but simply a vision of the world that you’d like to see? Can the world the practitioner would like to see be entirely separate from their practice? Is it intolerable Utopian idealism to suggest that the present opus and topos could be somewhat improved, even a little? If Utopia is fully dead and irrevivable, who would that suit? If we could should we not have it live again? Who killed it, who pronounced it dead, who might benefit from its continuance lifeless?

Architectural design is inherently - definitionally - Utopian, the description of a place that does not exist, the proposal of an idealised future, the development of a set of instructions to get there, conditioned of course by all of the usual limits imposed by the financial and regulatory context, the sponsor’s own vision, by reality itself, a Utopia thus conditioned by reality, a not which could be, and which in fact is willed to be. And again, the not is no longer when it is; the Utopia ceases to exist when it's realised.

Given ideal circumstances of abundantly available technology, knowledge and skill, and abundantly available material and human resources, of well-designed process well-followed, and the sponsor’s expressed requirements an accurate representation of their actual needs, then might the emerged artefact meet the ideal, one of the ideals at least held by one of the parties to the process, perhaps even all of the ideals held by all of those parties.

One might imagine such an outcome entirely unremarkable, mere satisfactory execution of a satisfactory design, and of course that might seem an entirely reasonable expectation. What one would actually find it to be though is never to be. Those conditions of appropriate design, adequate availability, satisfactory performance and optimal environment upon which ideal outcomes rely are of course much more than could ever be expected.

It is then in the nature of the limits and acceptance of them that is found the character of the achievable Utopia. Every topos must begin in its own absence, must so begin as Utopia, must find itself within its own limits.

The Utopia is simply the unreal nonexistent, the place fenced off by the limits of possibility, or by the limits of opportunity, or simply by that line between what is and what is not.

That which is Utopian through an absolute impossibility is useless to us anyway, this us being those who’d wish to guide good concrete outcomes. Such a Utopia could never be any kind of an ideal. That which is Utopian in its improbability is similarly so. Our towns will not walk on telescopic stilts, and nor would we wish them to. The inhabitants of our towns will not behave in the predictable and rational ways we would demand if we were to demand, and nor would we wish them to either, nor would we wish to make any demands. In our Utopia are no demands save the demands that one makes of oneself, and we hope generous demands for the benefit of all.

Any proposed ideal Utopia worth any kind of a damn at all is not remotely so through physical impossibility, nor achievable only through great difficulty or cost, for what kind of a worthwhile Utopian ideal should ever make things hard for us? Our ideal Utopia is actually easily achievable, or more particularly in an easy achievability, though to make things easy through design is a feat of good design.

So it is, that our ideal Utopia and Utopian ideal is in what it does for us and enables us to do, and do easily. It is in easy and generous grant, and easy and generous seizure, of a broad and generous opportunity.

To withdraw from any kind of idealism or Utopianism is simply to cede the field to the worst. Something needs to be built, or developed, some new space must be in the ongoing always opened up, whether one likes it or not. Performative hard-nosed realism has never revealed itself to be either brave or enlightened, but rather has it repeatedly been shown instead to be the refuge of the craven and the dull.

The best that we can do should surely be the very best that we can conceive of. The worst that we can do, assuming good intentions, is to conceive of nothing, the next worst is to conceive of nothing much beyond the regulatorily just enough.

Among the worst that we can do is to proceed in fear of what this place, though not yet, might become. Among the best is to proceed in hope of what it might become.

Little enough there is then between the two, but that little maybe enough to be everything.